Britain's cloud habit has become a billion-pound risk

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24-hour outage in key AWS region could leave UK firms nursing massive losses, researchers claim

Amid calls for digital sovereignty, a report warns that more than 60 percent of UK companies depend on cloud services for critical functions, and an outage in one or more of the big providers could prove costly.Researchers at the Cyber Monitoring Centre nonprofit found a high level of cloud dependence among British firms, rising to more than 80 percent among FTSE 100 firms, and say this means cloud outages will disproportionately affect some of the country's most economically important companies.Their report, The Cost of Downtime: UK Exposure to Cloud Infrastructure Failure, highlights Amazon as an example. Its European AWS cloud region (eu-west-1) in Dublin and its primary US cloud region (us-east-1) in Northern Virginia are identified as the largest aggregation points where failures could trigger widespread economic disruption for Brit businesses.

It estimates that a 24-hour outage in either of these regions could result in revenue losses of £1 billion ($1.34 billion) and £650 million ($872 million), respectively. Those figures only include losses incurred by users of the affected clouds, rather than any firms or supply chains that might depend on the affected companies.